Office English / Emails

Emails. Should they be formal? Friendly? It can be difficult to know.

Voicenote clipsMore formal than informal, although at times you might get a smiley face from me.

If it's someone that I've never spoken to before then it's more formal. But I'd still probably say Hi rather than Dear.

You know, those technicalities of when to write Kind regards and when to write Best wishes.

Today on Office English, we're learning the best language for emails, whoever you're sending them to.

Hello and welcome to a brand new business podcast series Office English from BBC Learning English. I'm Pippa.

And I'm Phil. And in this series, we'll be guiding you through the trickier areas of business language and discussing some useful words and phrases for you to use in the office or wherever you work.

Business language can be tricky. Even for native speakers of English. And the workplace is changing all the time with new technology and more people working from home. So we're here to talk about some of the techniques and phrases that we use at work.

At BBC Learning English we're all fluent English speakers working in a British cultural context. So that's the situation we have the most advice for. But we'll try to point out where things might be a bit different in different workplaces around the world.

This first episode is all about emails. We've already heard from BBC colleagues that not everyone agrees on how we should write emails. But what do you think, Phil? Should an email sound like a letter?